Uncomfortable Words

The Bonfire — By Anthony Brendon

If a child alone on a desert island were to be visited suddenly by two presences—one, a divine, angelic winged creature with comfortable hands and eyes that shone with love and mercy, the other a hideous, scaly fiend, with a hissing tail, immense claws, and jets of flame for eyes—we imagine that the child's first feeling would not be one of wonder and delight at the angel; it would be terror, uncontrollable terror, at sight of the fiend. He would not even be certain that the angel could save him. The angel would have no meaning, no significance, for him except as a possible safeguard from the fiend. Even if the angel were to bear him away and set him down under a page 46 garden tree and play him a soft air upon a little harp, we do not believe that the child would ever recover from that monstrous vision. Terror might keep him from wandering far, might lend him a false look of listening to the harp, might cause him to join in the singing in the hope of keeping the fiend away, but one glimpse of the hissing tail again, and the doctrine of Divine Love would be nothing but a possible means of escape.

In a ‘coda’ to his book of short stories dealing with life at a Jesuit school, Mr. Brendon, while acclaiming the supreme excellence of the Jesuit education in that it teaches the doctrine of Divine Love, deplores the teaching of hell-fire to children. But, if we are to believe his account, were the flames to be removed, there would be left nothing but a cold fireplace. It is the devils who keep the schoolhorse in a glow, and not the angels. It is the sinfulness of those little boys, or their potential sinfulness, which is almost the whole concern of their masters. Lessons are only ‘of secondary consideration,’ play is a means of keeping out of mischief; during the day the boys are never out of sight of a warder, at night the dormitories are patrolled by a figure in felt slippers carrying a lantern. This ‘watching’ the author defends on the ground that ‘it did maintain a standard of bodily purity. The boys left school unsullied: was the price too high to pay?’

We find this idea of the persistent viciousness of normal healthy children very hard to swallow. But, if we have read Mr. Brendon aright, the Jesuits do not believe there is such a person as a normal healthy boy; there is the coarse, cunning and dirty-minded boy, and the too soft, too gentle, almost idiotic boy. Both of them are defective; both stand an equally good chance of going to hell, an equally poor one of getting to heaven; and since the human soul is far more easily ensnared by terror than by love, shake the devil at them five times for every once that you show them the angel. It is a sorry view of childhood. The argument apart, these stories are written with an page 47 admirable simplicity of style. But whether the author is ironic or naive is an intriguing little problem for the reader to solve.